Search results

The aim of the chapter is to focus on the connections between three types of actors who build the new world of brands – consumers, marketers, and financier – by focusing on the co-creation of value between the brand community and the company owning the brand.

The chapter use three case vignettes to highlight the dual process at play when a community of consumers co-create brand value.

The chapter not only highlights a value-creating trajectory for companies but also shows how a reverse process can destroy value for the very same companies. It suggests that marketers’ desire to maximize the value co-created between the company and the community in order to answer the financial requirement of brand valuation could damage the value co-creation process. According to our case vignettes’ results, these marketers are exposing themselves to the risk that consumers/fans will rebel as a result of this branding maximization, leading in return to the creation of a competitor in the form of a community brand.

Future research will have to investigate how by cutting across organizational boundaries and functional areas, brand communities would reshape the marketing–finance interface.

The chapter stresses the need for companies to manage carefully the triadic relationship community/marketing/finance in order to avoid the development of a reverse brand value destruction process. In addition, the chapter contributes to research on the marketing–finance interface by highlighting the need to look beyond this level of interaction when it comes to branding.

Starting with the principle that consumers grouped into communities are increasingly responsible for making brands through their value-creating practices, the chapter highlights the problems raised by the company’s will to transform them into value for shareholders.

This chapter deals with five key themes: the objectives for companies and the attitudes and buying behaviour of consumers as concerns sustainable development, the firm’s strategies for reducing energy costs and waste, the challenges of bringing all actors in the supply chain into line, the firm’s supply policy in response to consumer demand and the technical, organisational and communication challenges surrounding the environmental impact of products. It then considers at the role of governments and NGOs in companies’ approaches towards sustainable development strategies before finally outlining the future prospects for these strategies.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) calls for far-reaching changes to the way economic activity will occur in EU digital markets. Before its remedies are imposed, it is critical to assess their impacts on individual markets, the digital sector, and the overall European economy. The European Commission (EC) released an Impact Assessment in support of the DMA that purports to evaluate it using cost/benefit analysis.

An economic evaluation of the DMA should consider its full impacts on dynamic competition. The Impact Assessment neither assesses the DMA's impact on dynamic competition in the digital economy nor evaluates the impacts of specific DMA prohibitions and obligations. Instead, it considers benefits in general and largely ignores costs. We study its benefit assessments and find they are based on highly inappropriate methodologies and assumptions. A cost/benefit study using inappropriate methodologies and largely ignoring costs cannot provide a sound policy assessment.

Instead of promoting dynamic competition between platforms, the DMA will likely reinforce existing market structures, ossify market boundaries, and stunt European innovation. The DMA is likely to chill R&D by encouraging free riding on the investments of others, which discourages making those investments. Avoiding harm to innovation is critical because innovation delivers large, positive spillover benefits, driving increases in productivity, employment, wages, and prosperity.

The DMA prioritizes static over dynamic competition, with the potential to harm the European economy. Given this, the Impact Assessment does not demonstrate that the DMA will be beneficial overall, and its implementation must be carefully tailored to alleviate or lessen its potential to harm Europe’s economic performance.

Really creative posts on the social media accounts of brands or political parties can produce gratifyingly viral results that can boost brand engagement, loyalty, profits and votes. This makes it a highly attractive new marketing tool. However, when brands or parties get creativity on social media wrong it can damage reputation. This chapter examines two aspects of this trade-off between the viral and the virtuous. Firstly, the authors explore the regulations around labelling brand posts as adverts and show that they are very unclear, tempting brands to bend the rules or allowing them to inadvertently break them. Secondly, the authors consider memes: a content marketing technique widely used in political and commercial brand posts. The authors analyse the three creative elements core to memes along with successful and unsuccessful examples. The authors end by suggesting that regulators clarify the codes and invite readers to weigh up the pros and cons of using creative content marketing in brand posts.

This final chapter moves from a firm-level perspective to a more general level to connect individual organisational decisions on corporate sustainability to current and future societal and environmental challenges. The chapter starts by illustrating greenhushing, seen as a deceptive strategic silence that occurs when companies voluntarily decrease their communication on sustainability issues. The emergence of novel forms of greenwashing stresses the need to integrate the principles of sustainability in their corporate strategies in an authentic way, and to activate a virtuous circuit of sustainability sensegiving-sensemaking, in which the company can recognise the contribution of stakeholders in decision-making. The discussion then addresses some unresolved tensions in sustainability communication approaches that cause ‘deep-rooted’ greenwashing, thus paving the way for a systemic approach to the phenomenon. The chapter thus presents some speculative sketches that illustrate the social, organisational and environmental costs and benefits of an authentic approach to corporate sustainability. The discussion emphasises the need to establish a shared sustainability culture at different systems' levels and within organisations to avoid environmental and social damaging practices and widen corporate objectives to initiate long-lasting changes. Policy and decision-makers may appreciate this effort to identify responsibilities for each component and priority areas for action.

In the wake of the extraordinary financial scandals that both preceded and followed the September–October Financial Crises of 2008, discussions about the executive virtues of honesty and integrity are no longer academic or esoteric, but critically urgent and challenging. As representatives of the corporation, its products and services, corporate executives in general, and production, accounting, finance, and marketing executives in particular, must be the frontline public relations and goodwill ambassadors for their firms, products, and services. As academicians of business education, we must also analyze these corporate wrongdoings as objectively and ethically as possible. What is wrong must be declared and condemned as wrong, what is right must be affirmed and acknowledged as right. We owe it to our students, our profession, our stakeholders, and to the business world. Contemporary American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) proposes the issue of morality in a threefold question: Who am I? Who ought I to become? How ought I to get there? The answer to every question refers to the virtues, especially to corporate executive virtues. This chapter explores corporate executive virtues, especially the classical cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice as defining and enhancing corporate executive life.

In this paper, the possibility of a renewed ethics of the role of the physician is explored by appeal to the Hippocratic tradition. The Hippocratic Oath, in its many permutations, offers a unique historical example of a document that marks the boundary-crossing of the physician-in-training into the office of physician, properly speaking. In making the Oath, the physician or physician-in-training enters into a new maturity that develops out of his or her own subjective desires and constructs, through to an outlook that is bound to a transcendent ideal of both technical acumen in the chosen profession of the physician, but also in a zeal for that which is good or virtuous. In other words, the Hippocratic tradition focuses the maker of the Oath upon a moral good; both for the physician and also for the patient. It may be years of practice and reflection before the significance of the Oath is realised in any particular medical professional. The Hippocratic tradition calls physician and patient alike towards a higher, but also more realist sense of virtue – in its ordinary and everyday sense, and the manner in which the good may be perceived even in the messiest of life and death conundrums. In this sense, a Hippocratic ethics of the physician might be possible that shows how the notion of ‘dirty hands’ is misleading, but also promising, in terms of the ethical possibilities for renewed notion of the virtuous physician.